No illegal marriage hall will be spared: SBCA chief

All the illegal marriage halls in Karachi will be demolished, many of which have been constructed on amenity plots or along narrow lanes in different parts of the city.

Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) Director General (DG) Iftikhar Kaimkhani said this while talking to The News on Sunday. He maintained that a comprehensive plan had been chalked out to demolish the illegal marriage halls; however, its implementation would take time.

The DG SBCA claimed that owners of illegal halls were trying to pressurise the building control authority to stop the demolition of their illegal structures; however, they were not approaching the Supreme Court (SC) for that.

As per orders of the SC, all the illegal marriage halls will be demolished, Kaimkhani asserted. When asked whether the authority would also raze the private schools and hospitals that had been built on residential plots, the SBCA chief replied that such schools and hospitals could not be demolished as where the schoolchildren and patients of those schools and hospitals would go in case they were destroyed.

He added that the government should announce some policy with regard to hospitals on residential plots as there was already a shortage of health facilities in the city. It may be recalled here that the owners of marriage halls had recently threatened to close all the marriage halls in the city if the SBCA carried out its planned operation against the illegal halls.